Book Cover Design: The Secret History

I've wanted to try my hand at redesigning a book cover for a while now, so I thought I'd give it a go working on a set of alternative covers for one of my favorite novels - Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Below you can view three different versions with mockups. All mockups used courtesy of anthonyboyd/Freepik.

The novel is somewhat of a murder mystery in reverse - you know who's died at the very beginning of the book, but all the details get filled in as the story progresses. I wanted to capture something dramatic and dark with this design that I thought resonated with some of the mysterious aspects of the book. This design uses a painting of Bacchus or Dionysus (ancient Greek mythology is central to the book) by Paulus Bor, and I loved how dark and enveloping the original painting looked. I feel like this design plays on the darker, more mysterious themes throughout the book.

This design is a bit more playful or even funny. It references the fate of one of the main characters in the book, and I had fun playing with the texture of the different elements while combining these with the big blocky font. I don't know that this design captures the moody or dark aspects of the book terribly well, but I like the playful reference, and the opportunity to create an illustration of a small scene.

The final design also references a painting of Dionysus - this one by Johann Wilhelm Schütze. I wanted to capture more of the scholarly aspects of the novel (all of the main characters study exclusively in the Classics department at a small ficitionalized liberal arts collage), and I think this painting and the clean design capture some of that. I even think of the texture on the book as being almost tweed-like - a reference to the stereotypical caricature of professors in tweed jackets I suppose.